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Saturday, August 11, 2012

The US defense pie will get bigger under Mitt Romney

Mitt Romney's view of national defense:

President Obama has put us on course toward a “hollow” force. President Obama has repeatedly sought to slash funds for our fighting men and women, and over the next ten years nearly $1 trillion will be cut from the core defense budget.

The Obama administration’s cuts have left us with a military inventory largely composed of weapons designed forty to fifty years ago. The average age of our tanker aircraft is 47 years, of strategic bombers 34 years.

Our naval planners indicate we need 328 ships to fulfill the Navy’s role of global presence and power projection in defense of American security. Our Air Force, which had 82 fighter squadrons at the end of the Cold War, has been reduced to 39 today.

He (Mitt) will put our Navy on the path to increase its shipbuilding rate from nine per year to approximately fifteen per year. He will also modernize and replace the aging inventories of the Air Force, Army, and Marines, and selectively strengthen our force structure. And he will fully commit to a robust, multi-layered national ballistic-missile defense system to deter and defend against nuclear attacks on our homeland and our allies.

We cannot rebuild our military strength without paying for it. Mitt will begin by reversing Obama-era defense cuts and return to the budget baseline established by Secretary Robert Gates in 2010, . . .at a floor of 4 percent of GDP. .

In 2005, the United States spent 4.06% of its GDP on its military (basic Department of Defense budget spending). We also spend another and another 1.5 percent on broader security efforts.

When you factor in the cost of VA and Homeland Security, these expenses total more than 60 per cent of federal revenues.

Defense spending benefits a narrow sector of defense corporations. Of interest, some the most highly paid CEOS aren't banksters. Nope, these one per centers work in the defense industry.